Twitter suffers inauguration-related problems

Twitter appeared to be back up Tuesday after suffering disruptions and delayed service on Monday when it saw 1.1 million tweets related to the inauguration of President Barack Obama.

During a 13-hour period, Twitter's user support operation issued a series of tweets reporting problems, beginning with, "Profile photo upload is unavailable at the moment. Hold tight, we hope to have it back soon" followed six hours later by "Some users may be experiencing issues accessing Twitter. Engineers are working to resolve this problem."

Frustrated users tweeted out sarcastic responses such as "hi is twitter shutting down for a week or what?"

(FILES) The Twitter logo is displayed at the entrance of Twitter headquarters in San Francisco in this March 11, 2011 file photo. KIMIHIRO HOSHINO/AFP/GettyImages (KIMIHIRO HOSHINO)

The problems seemed to be intermittent, with users able to receive updates and post to Twitter one minute, but unable to the next.

The outage started about 2 p.m. Pacific time and Twitter's blog was still reporting about 8 p.m. that some users were experiencing issues.

At one point, Twitter even reported that its help center was having problems.

Twitter's final problem-related tweet Monday night said, "Some users may be experiencing issues accessing Twitter. Our engineers are currently working to resolve the issue."

Then later Monday, without an explanation, Twitter updated the tweet to say, "This incident has been resolved."

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Twitter had boasted of extreme usage during Obama's Inauguration Day events, announcing that there were about 1.1 million tweets sent during the official ceremony that referenced the inauguration, easily eclipsing the 82,392 sent during the president's 2009 ceremony.

Twitter had severe issues with outages in the early days of its service but has mostly put the "Fail Whale" to rest in the past few years; the last major outage occurred in early November.

Contact Dan Nakaso at 408-271-3648. Follow him at Twitter.com/dannakaso.